Nightscapes from Afar E-Book

Tomasz Tatum

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 33

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The text and prose contained in this collection dates back as far as the early 1980s. Some are coolly-distant observations which could form the lyrical basis for a song while others stand alone, radiating individuality and a deeply personal character. In sum, they paint a picture in which the intensity and the gravity forming the nucleus of the early first-person narrations is deconstructed, like pinpoints of light within the constellation of a much larger scheme of things. While the first-person significance seems to diminish with this perspective, the order inherent within this bigger picture benefits directly from the structure provided by each individual observation.

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword

National Youth

Evaporate!

Safe Keeping

Where’d Ya Think I was Going?

Heard It Yesterday

Back from LA

Injustice Every Day

A Puppet Life

Autumn

Futureworld

So Blue for Her

Blues from a Bottle

Bonefish Boogie

City Girl

Coming Up for Air

In December

Electrify Me

Hundred Years

Empty Houses

Falling Angels

Summer

Nighttime in America

Plenty of Reasons

Wanna Know Why

The It’s-All-in-God’s-Hands Blues

Hotspot

Rainy Days

An Invitation

Living your Lies

Online Tonight

Rambling with My Rohrschachs

Things You Do!

When the Americans Came

Riding the Bus

The Waiting Game

Spring and July

Taxi Blues

Sunset

Wanna be a Fan of Miley’s

The Wind in your Face

Yer Beauty Mark

Lantern

In the Ocean

The Visit

Tricked Me into Thinking

Weekend Wager

You Told Me

Intercity

Foreword

Way back when I was a kid, one of my first real heroes was Dr. Seuss. From what I gather, his stories continue to sell well to this day, which I find fully justified and phenomenal, too. But I’m not sure whether this ongoing success is for the same reason as it was back then. Sure, the stories are funny and the characters populating his books are both sympathetic and zany. But, intentional or not, Dr. Seuss was teaching us something very significant as he stretched creative license to its limits with his rhymes and word concoctions. He taught us how to connect the dots not only linguistically but helped young readers see and recognize abstract notions while imparting values into his tales. Maybe I’m wrong, but I suspect that the Grinch or the Cat in the Hat are today mostly appreciated as good entertainment, simply because of their anarchic funniness. But it was his prose which, for me, was the first tentative step into a world which later grew, opening doors to progressively deeper fare.

While never averse to the prose and poetry which my schooling brought with it, I can’t recall many of my teachers straying very far afield from standard fare: dead old men (and a few ladies). All was not lost upon a roomful of adolescents but Longfellow, Frost, Whitman and Dickenson resided on lofty pedestals, in part because of the indisputable craft and beauty of their work–but also because of the vast distance we juveniles felt toward the language and the themes of their work. They were the literary equivalents of alabaster busts of George Washington, important but with little in common with us. In high school, very few of us suspected something like a McCarthyist gap in American prose in the 20th century, but even fewer of us ever learned whether this was indeed so or why. Call it instinct, but we sensed a missing link, something residing between the otherworldliness of those early poets and what was later branded as pop culture.

Maybe it was Bob Dylan who changed this by rousing interest in the poetry and prose his music contained. And of the relevance it truly has in our perception of the world and of ourselves. At the end of the 1950s, American beat poets and writers were pushing the boundaries of prose and literature. And getting noticed. But, had I spent my adult life only in the US, I fear that I probably would have missed something. Later American work by writers like Ntozake Shange or Everette Maddox (which I discovered in German publications in the 1980s) didn’t attract a lot of notice. Nor did mainstream America seem to care much about James Baldwin, Seamus Heaney or Rafael Alberti–at least not until they became Nobel Prize recipients or died.